DuPage Monarch Project presents Glen Ellyn Park District with community engagement award

The Glen Ellyn Park District is receiving the Pat Miller Community Engagement Award for Habitat Heroes, a volunteer program for monitoring pollinators.

Over the past two years, Chris Gutmann, Natural Areas and Outdoor Education Manager, has worked on developing a new kind of opportunity for Glen Ellyn Park District volunteers.

Gutmann is a biologist and brings the perspective of an ecologist to managing natural areas. He looks at the interaction of soil, plants and wildlife to assess how well a restored prairie or woodland is performing to figure out how that area can be improved for wildlife.

He is managing natural areas as habitat which requires knowing how many and what kind of bees and butterflies are showing up looking for food and are they finding suitable areas for nesting and hibernating.

Gutmann and Laurie Bellmar, Environmental Outreach Coordinator, developed protocols for surveying butterflies and spent the summer of 2024 testing them and working out the kinks. Two questions needed to be answered: Is this an enjoyable experience for a volunteer, and how difficult would it be to learn.

Volunteers were recruited in 2025 to learn how to monitor butterflies. Three sessions were scheduled during the summer and a total of 18 volunteers participated. An initial trial of native bee monitoring was also conducted this past summer.

Chris and Bellmar are training citizen scientists to collect the data needed for evaluating the performance of natural areas. The data will be used for adapting natural area management practices in order to provide the best forage and shelter for native bees and butterflies.

There was a preview this summer of how well the Maryknoll natural area is performing after years of ecological restoration. Dogs with the Conservation Dogs Collective were deployed at Maryknoll to look for bumble bee nests. No nests were found but the dog handler was astonished by the sheer abundance of bumble bees they encountered.

This fall is the official launch of Habitat Heroes. Eventually monitoring will be conducted at the natural areas in five parks, Ackerman Woods, Churchill Park, Lake Ellyn, Maryknoll and Glen Ellyn Manor Park + Manor Woods.

The Pat Miller Community Engagement Award will be presented to the Glen Ellyn Park District by the DuPage Monarch Project at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 21, at 185 Spring Ave. in Glen Ellyn. For information, visit dupagemonarchs.com. Follow facebook.com/dupagemonarchproject/ or instagram.com/dupage_monarch_proj/.